Susan's Reviews asked Katherine Center:

While I was reading Happiness for Beginners, I kept visualizing a young, spunky Annie Potts as Helen and a young James Franco for Jake. Do you model your characters on favourite actors or personal acquaintances? Your characters seem so real to me. By the way, I'm not a fan of sequels, but Duncan's story - or a character like Duncan - would be hilarious.

Katherine Center This is a great question! I'd say, for the most part, I don't really model characters on anyone in particular, although there are a few exceptions. Mostly, I know a few basic things about them at the beginning, and then I just slowly get to know them as the story goes along. Duncan, for example, started out as a very 2-D kind of character—his original job was to be just an annoying younger brother. But the more time I spent thinking about him, and the more time Helen and Jake spent talking about him, the more complicated and interesting he became. And Jake was just such a devoted fan of Duncan, and he believed in him so much, that I found myself becoming more interested in Duncan, too--like, as I was writing. By the time Duncan showed back up at the end of the story, I was ready to spend some time with him. He became a much bigger character than I ever expected he would--in part because Jake just kept insisting he was more than just a secondary character. So maybe that sounds a little crazy, but I got interested in one of my characters because the other characters kept talking about him, and the more I listened, the more curious I became . . .

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